Tag: rejection

Well, let me rephrase that. I wrote1, edited2, revised2, outlined1, translated3, reviewed4, critiqued4, and miscellaneous-othered5 100010 words. I set my goal for 100,000 words way back in January, performed some long division, and set up a Beeminder Goal for 274 words a day. Halfway through the year, with Summer approaching, I felt all stressed out…

EDITED TO ADD (with a huge facepalm): Oh, and I won the SF Comet contest! Another year over A new one just begun It may be corny to the point of maudlinity* to quote this particular song by Mr Lennon, but I can’t help getting a bit reflective upon the new year. Big changes occurred in…

Yet another Villa Diodati workshop behind me, and once more it was a wonderful experience: friends, great conversation, good food, and geekiness aplenty. Better still: this may have been the most productive VD of the 10. As usual, a group of Villa Diodati speculative fiction writers—myself among them—gathered in an idyllic location (in this case,…

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After making the rounds for a while, collecting rejections, my story Engineering—kind of a torture porn* episode of The Twilight Zone—ended up with Dark Discoveries. Editor Paul Dudley rejected it, but in the subsequent correspondence gave some good thoughts on what the story needed to stand a better chance, even with DD. By that time,…

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Queen of diamonds, the third in my trilogy of really-long-stories-written-in-the-middle-of-the-decennium, just bagged its 17th rejection. What’s up with that? I wrote it between Conversation with a mechanical horse (Writers of the Future published finalist) and Meeting the Sculptor (WotF first place winner), and love it as least as much as those two. It made WotF…

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Parting is such sweet sorrow. Especially when it’s a parting with a story I’m fond of, but the editors aren’t. The unwieldily titled What happened while Don was watching the game collected its 8th rejection this week*, from Sniplits this time. Sniplits mastermind and editor Anne Stuessy seemed to take over a year to get…

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So when after 81 days GUD sent me an email informing me of Prisoner of War’s 8th rejection, I wasn’t even that disappointed. After all, what’s a little artistic rejection when you have your baby’s sonogram as background image in your cool new phone? Anyway, POW bounced right back out there, this time to the…

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Prisoner of war is rackin’ em up! Its seventh rejection came from Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show (fondly known as IGMS), and it wasn’t even a personal rejection. But who knows, maybe it was destined for GUD all that time. I sure hope it was, for that is where it is now. I thought…

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There are places in the world where no one comes. Ever. I’m not thinking of remote areas of Antarctica or unclimbed summits in the Cordilleras de los Andes. Nor do I believe there are bits of jungle in deep, dark Ruanda that will never be seen by human eyes. No, I’m thinking of the armpits…